Printing systems or printers are used to facilitate the printing of hard copies, of electronic documents stored or prepared on user devices, for personal, business, or administrative purposes. Examples of user devices may include workstations, personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop computers, notebooks, smart phones, and the like. The printers can directly communicate with the user devices, or can communicate with the user devices over a network.
Generally, a user can submit a print job to the printer in the form of page description language (PDL) file from any of the user devices connected to the network. The print job can be submitted either by using a printer driver or by using a driverless web-based platform. The printer driver is normally associated with only one printer; however, the web-based platform is normally associated with all the printers connected to the network.
At the printer, a raster image processor (RIP) receives the PDL file having an input image. In an example, the input image may include one or more fill objects such as characters, words, text, and other objects such as graphics, photos, etc. The PDL file received at the RIP includes information describing the layout of the input image as it was created on the user device used by the user. Also, the RIP makes the decision on how to process the input image based on what PDL the input image is described in. Based on the decision, the RIP converts the input image from their form in the PDL file to a sequence of serial instructions for the printer in a process commonly known as “ripping” and provides a ripped image to an image storage-and-retrieval system known as a print engine. The print engine converts the ripped image into a ready-to-print (RTP) format and makes it available to the printer for printing the input image.
However, while the making the input image available to the printer, the user of the user device is provided with limited option of editing or modifying the quality of the input image including, for example, selecting some settings such as lighting/darkening of the input image. In this relation, various efforts regarding printers or printing system have been made in past for continuing developments to improve the image quality. One such effort includes fattening of stroke or edge pixels of the fill objects present in the input image for image quality enhancement. However, in such efforts, interior regions or fill regions of the fill objects remain unchanged while the edge pixels are fattened by a user-specified amount. This in turn may lead to severe content loss as the fattened edge pixels may overlap pixels present in the interior regions of the fill objects.